A syrupy serving of Freudian analysis that looks
tempting
but tastes
of too much superego, id, and subconscious jive to be
taken seriously.
It's Hollywood's version about what psychoanalysis is
all about, which
is making the analyst a combination of a savior and
parental figure who
can magically unlock the secrets of the mentally ill
by offering them
love
and concern on a couch. This is the first major film
about that
subject,
and its sincere presentation to show it in its best
light is often
awkward
and seems quite outdated when viewed today. Hitchcock
throws in a
murder
mystery that works a little better than all the mumbo
jumbo Psych 1
lingo.

Dr. Constance Peterson (Ingrid Bergman) is a
brilliant but
dogmatic,
unfeeling, over-analytical psychoanalyst, in a mental
institution
located
in rural Rutland, Vermont, who upsets her male
colleagues by not
returning
their sexual advances. Her new boss, Dr. Edwardes
(Peck), immediately
attracts
her and they fall in love to the consternation of her
former pursuers
who
thought she was frigid.

It turns out that Dr. Edwardes is an impostor and an
amnesiac, who
has taken the place of the missing doctor. Just
before he's
discovered
he slips a note under her door and flees to a NYC
hotel to try and
figure
out the cause of his dizzy spells and who he is, and
how he got to
become
Dr. Edwardes-- the shrink who was scheduled to replace
the hospital's
twenty
year veteran, Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll).

Constance runs to NYC after the possibly dangerous
man,
whose sanity
is under question, and when found takes him to
Rochester to meet her
elderly
mentor, the wise psychoanalyst, Dr. Alex Brulov
(Chekhov). He gets the
amnesiac to relate to him a dream, one that was
artfully designed by
Salvador
Dali (the highlight of the film). It then becomes a
murder mystery tale
as the amnesiac through Constance's loving help
unlocks her lover's
past
secret and enables him to visualize where Dr. Edwardes
is buried in the
snow and how they met for lunch in the presence of Dr.
Murchison. But
when
the police find the dead man, they discover he's been
killed by a
bullet
and charge the Gregory Peck character with murder. To
the rescue comes
Constance, who does her analyst thing and figures out
who the real
murderer
is. As she told Brulov, she could never love a
murderer and therefore
the
way is clear for her to marry Peck.

It's a heavy-handed film that is earnestly played by
the
stars, but
has no resonance. It was one of the master's weaker
films, yet it's
still
worth seeing because there are many imaginative
Hitchcock touches
throughout.

The script was written by Ben Hecht, who obviously
didn't
have much
of a feel for the subject-matter. His idea of
psychiatry is limited to
having the practitioner sweet talking the patient to
spill his guts out
and miraculously coming up with the cure to all his
problems. Ingrid
and
Peck do their best to work through the stale lines
they are forced to
say,
though they never make their characters believable
despite their best
thespian
efforts. This film is really spellbound.